on 01/30/2014 11:04 PM James wrote the following: > Peter Humphrey <peter <at> prh.myzen.co.uk> writes: > > >>> Maybe you chose unwisely?............(get ATI next time) unless > >> >> I've used nVidia cards for many years. When I bought my first one >> (maybe 20 years ago) ATI support in Linux was woeful, and the doggerel >> had it that the hardware was less competent too, so I chose nVidia. >> >> Since then I've seen more cries for help on this list from ATI >> owners than nVidia, so it's not clear to me which is the better choice >> these days. > Since I don't do bigotry my choice is on technical grounds, >> and I don't > need hardware 3D acceleration. So the jury's still out as >> far as I'm concerned. Well, maybe CUDA might ramp up my contribution >> rate to BOINC projects a bit. Again, no obvious winner. > > I agree with all you have said. However Nvidia's policies, not their > hardware, is the problem, hence the degraded comment on their reputation. > A company may struggle with the latest, robust hardware, but they > do not have to behave as "jerks". Nvidia's lack of copperation with > their old hardware, puts them in the "jerks" column in my mindset. > Even cisco provides full and complete sources, (from russia with love!). > > The person is using old hardware, and for a very long time, ATI has > been the better choice for folks using old (video) hardware. He's not > pushing the limits of performance; he just wants (needs?) a video card with > an open source solution. I like to (stongly) suggest to folks to > use their "checkbook" to influence the behavior of vendors, ymmv. > > Folks with low_dollars are almost aways better off with ATI, particualar > if they intend to run 'vintage video hardware', imho. >
James, I agree with you in general about supporting "open source friendly vendors", but in this case, I would agree with Peter, because I find that Nvidia although not so "open" as ATI, has been better supporting (quicker to release drivers) for its newer cards than ATI does. On the other hand, the old system I was talking about, is an Athlon 754 socket, with an NVIDIA G71 [GeForce 7800 GS] (rev a2) card. I believe this card can use up the system's AGP bus (and the CPU) to its limits, so I don't feel I should bother to change the card to an ATI one, since I wouldn't gain any performance, except perhaps, for a "radeon" driver in the kernel, which I doubt would perform as well as the Nvidia's one. Anyway, this Nvidia-vs-ATI discussion is going OT in the current thread. And I think that we can close the current thread here. Thanks to all for your help :)
